Culture of Production and Black Underlife. Notes on Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis”

The article is dedicated to “Black Metamorphosis. New Natives in the New World,” Sylvia Wynter’s manuscript written between 1971 and 1982. First, I present the key features of the monograph and engage with two of Wynter’s arguments. The first one states that orthodox Marxism repeats the reductionist logic of capitalism, and is thus unable to explain the exploitation of reproduction and enslaved labour. The second, related to the revolutionary role of the indigenous black culture, enables Wynter to analyse not only capitalism but the overarching bourgeois “culture of production.” Wynter’s text reveals that a return to early modernity is necessary to understand more contemporary history, which is rooted in the social forms of colonial capitalism and the bourgeois code of imperial Europe. By looking at marginalized cultural practices, Wynter exposes the power of alternative ways of being, which became the basis of contemporary revolutionary social movements. To discuss the relevance of her proposal, I juxtapose it with more contemporary notions important for black and decolonial thought: the undercommons and abolition.